For years, Black drivers have been far more likely to be stopped and ticketed by police in Baltimore County than white drivers.

Elected officials and police leadership have been well aware of the racial disparities in traffic stops. Six years ago, they even vowed to study the issue and correct it.

Instead, the disparities have remained entrenched. In a county that is only about 30% Black, Baltimore County police officers stopped Black drivers over 80,000 more times than white drivers between 2018 and 2024. Black drivers made up 57% of total traffic stops during that period, according to a Banner analysis.

Traffic stops in the county have been so disproportionate that the Baltimore County Police Department ranked worst in racial disparities among larger police departments in the state every year between 2018 and 2024.

When presented with The Banner’s findings, county officials defended the Police Department, saying race isn’t a primary motivator in the ticketing differences. Instead, a department spokesperson suggested the racial disparities “could be related to traffic patterns, driving patterns, offending patterns, or the focus on policing activity in particular areas of the locality.”

But The Banner’s analysis, which combined state-maintained traffic stop data with tens of thousands of court records, found that, even in some of the whitest parts of the county, Black drivers receive the majority of traffic tickets.

Officers working out of the Towson precinct, an area that is 23% Black, wrote 70% of their citations to Black drivers between 2021 and 2024. Black drivers received more tickets than white drivers in nine of the county’s 10 police precincts. Only in the Cockeysville precinct, where only about 7% of residents are Black, were white drivers ticketed more often.

Frank Baumgartner, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor who researches police bias, reviewed The Banner’s analysis and described the findings as “consistent with stereotyping and profiling.”

Though police leaders and elected officials will often attempt to “poke holes in the evidence,” Baumgartner said the data painted a clear picture.

“In our guts, we all know there’s such a thing as driving while Black,” he said. “And it’s quite troublesome.”

Black drivers aren’t just more likely to be stopped, the analysis found. They’re also more likely than white drivers to get a ticket instead of a warning over many of the same infractions. And they’re twice as likely to be searched.

The Baltimore County Police Department is one of the state’s largest law enforcement agencies, with more than 1,700 sworn members — 74% of them white. The county is 52% white, according to U.S. census data.

Some of the department’s most prolific ticket writers issued more than three of every four citations to Black drivers, the analysis found. At least two of those officers were accused of racial profiling in complaints to the county’s Police Accountability Board. Both were exonerated within a month.

The disparities don’t just stem from a few dozen officers. Even discounting officers who wrote more than 70% of their citations to Black drivers between 2021 and 2024, the county’s police force issued the majority of its citations to Black people.

The appetite among county officials to drive the disparities down appears to have faded.

In 2019, former County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. commissioned studies into the issue and convened an “equitable policing advisory group.” In 2021, his administration released an online dashboard showing basic information about traffic stops by race.

The advisory group’s influence has been limited at best. Its meetings rarely include community leaders or county residents. The traffic stop advisory group has met just three times since the start of 2024: in January, July and October of that year. The three meetings lasted an average of 14 minutes and 30 seconds.

The Police Department spokesperson said the group was awaiting a “final report of recommendations” and “it should be noted that sub-workgroups are meeting.”

In response to The Banner’s findings, Olszewski, now a U.S. representative, said through a spokesperson that “any race-based disparity within law enforcement needs to be addressed.”

Multiple people interviewed by The Banner who were involved with the advisory group expressed hope that the disparities were at least trending in the right direction.

But The Banner’s analysis found no such improvements.

Even as traffic stops and searches have decreased since the pandemic, the disparities have remained. Baltimore County officers made fewer than half as many traffic stops in 2024 as in 2019, but Black drivers were still more than twice as likely to be searched as white drivers were.

Chief Robert McCullough, the county’s first Black police leader, declined several interview requests regarding racial disparities in traffic stops. Instead, the Baltimore County Police Department pushed back against many of The Banner’s questions in written statements, citing caveats from the study the county had commissioned into the issue years ago.

In response to specific data findings, Joy Lepola-Stewart, the police spokesperson, quoted generalities from the research paper, such as “disparities in the aggregate data may not reflect discrimination on the part of individual officers or a bias” and “traffic stop data does not, and cannot, uncover officer motivations in making traffic stops.”

‘I am a potential target’

On a frigid day in January 2024, Taiji Williams was driving while wearing a Nike mask to keep his face warm.

As he drove, he approached a county police cruiser, and the officer who saw him immediately pulled a U-turn, according to a complaint Williams submitted to the Police Accountability Board.

As the officer followed him, Williams began to feel “completely unsafe, uncomfortable and scared,” he wrote.

“As a Black male, I am a potential target, and feel that deciding to follow me with no reason besides seeing that I had on a mask is completely unethical,” he said. “I wore my mask on my head to keep myself warm and that is not against any law.”

The officer who pulled him over, Richard Reich, wrote more than 200 citations between 2021 and 2024, and 89% were given to Black drivers, according to The Banner’s analysis of court records.

Williams wrote in his complaint that he received citations totaling $1,160 and five warnings, which he felt was retaliation for asking for the officer’s name and badge number. Williams could not be reached for comment.

Reich was exonerated less than a month after police received the complaint. In response to questions from The Banner, Lepola-Stewart said Reich is assigned to patrol and works as a field training officer, which makes him “responsible for ensuring new officers conduct multiple traffic stops.”

Weeks later, the spokesperson followed up in a separate email with a list of Reich’s accolades, which included several officer of the month awards as well as recognitions from lawmakers and local community groups. Reich did not respond to requests for comment.

Baumgartner, the university professor, said officers often use traffic stops as a pretext to search people they deem suspicious for drugs or weapons.

Excluding stops where an officer has less discretion on making an arrest, such as DUI stops, Baltimore County police searched Black drivers 73% of the time, The Banner’s analysis found.

Meanwhile, searches of Black drivers were less likely to lead to an arrest or the discovery of contraband, such as drugs or weapons, than searches of white drivers, the analysis found.

Black drivers face harsher outcomes

In September 2023, 30-year department veteran Jeffery Gale pulled over a Black woman near a strip mall in Catonsville.

The driver, who asked not to be named due to fear of retaliation for commenting publicly while serving in the military, told The Banner that she recognized Gale, who is white, immediately.

“I see this dude driving up and down this same road all day, every day, pulling people over,” she said. “And it’s always Black people or Hispanic people.”

The Banner’s analysis of court records backed up her assertion. Between 2021 and October 2023, Gale issued 773 traffic citations — and 71% of them went to Black drivers.

Gale retired from the Baltimore County Police Department sometime after that and joined the Howard County Sheriff’s Office as a deputy in February 2024, according to a social media post by that agency.

The driver Gale pulled over had returned from military service two months earlier. She said she didn’t realize that her registration had expired. But instead of warning the driver, Gale seized her license plates and had her car towed from the strip mall.

Officers generally carry a wide range of discretion in enforcing minor traffic violations. But in Baltimore County, police are less likely to show leniency to Black drivers than to white drivers during the same kinds of traffic stops, according to The Banner’s analysis.

In registration-related stops, about one in every four white drivers were cited. For Black drivers, the rate was closer to one in three. Hispanic drivers were cited 36% of the time.

A complaint that goes nowhere

Exasperated from the encounter, and unaware of how to get her license plates back, the driver filed a complaint against Gale with the recently formed Police Accountability Board, mandated by state law in 2021.

The citizen-led board is meant to serve as an independent check on internal police investigations by funneling citizen misconduct complaints to a related Administrative Charging Committee.

According to the board’s annual report for 2024, the charging committee declined to bring charges for 74% of the 512 cases they reviewed through the first 10 months of that year. Many of the charges stemmed from vehicle crashes; the committee brought charges in 84% of car accident cases.

The larger accountability board has drawn criticism from county residents and advocacy groups for voting down a measure that would allow it to review misconduct complaints, fueling doubts about its appetite to go against the police.

Peter Fitzpatrick, a member of the board who has pushed it to take a more active role, referenced that vote, adding that county and Police Department lawyers actively fought against it.

“I’m very concerned that this level of disparity in policing was brought to the Police Accountability Board with the board being completely and deliberately kept unaware of it as a matter of policy,” Fitzpatrick said in a text message.

In the driver’s complaint, filed in October 2023, she wrote that she suspected Gale of “profiling in the area.”

But the investigation, led by the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division, focused on whether Gale acted improperly by having the driver’s car towed and seizing her license plates.

Investigators searched Gale’s history for accusations of racial bias, reporting that they found none. The summary of the investigation made no mention of checking Gale’s ticketing history.

During a recorded interview with the driver, an investigator with the Internal Affairs Division assured her that Gale was well within his rights to seize her license plates because the tags had expired more than a year earlier. Gale, the investigator said, “did everything proper.”

“On the plus side, at least Officer Gale wrote a bunch of warnings, instead of making these all tickets and making that uncomfortable for you,” he said.

Baltimore County police declined to provide documentation or answer questions about its guidelines for when officers should have a vehicle towed.

Gale received a similar complaint over towing a vehicle with an expired registration just months earlier, in March 2023. Baltimore County police pointed out that Gale was a member of a “precinct traffic team.” He issued the seventh most citations in the department between 2021 and 2024, according to The Banner’s analysis.

The Internal Affairs Division of the Baltimore County Police Department exonerated Gale in both complaints, noting in the investigation of the March 2023 complaint that Gale was “polite and respectful” during his interactions with the driver. The department echoed those remarks in responding to questions about Gale.

“At no point during the traffic stop does body-worn camera footage show the driver complaining about the officer’s demeanor,” the department said in a statement.

Gale did not respond to requests for comment.

Baumgartner, the university professor, said that police leaders asked to explain racial disparities might feel defensive about it, and “often shift the conversation into accusations of racial prejudice, bias and anti-Black animus on the part of individual officers.”

In reality, he said, the influences behind the disparities are often unseen.

That could mean police are more aggressive in certain areas of the county than others or patrol certain roadways more frequently. It could also come down to the time of day when law enforcement is most active.

Baumgartner added that individual implicit bias also plays a potential role, but outright racial prejudice is less common.

“These things could be coming from standard operating procedures,” he said.

Ticketed or targeted?

Some Black drivers pulled over by Baltimore County officers with significant racial ticketing disparities told The Banner they didn’t know there was a complaint process with the Police Accountability Board.

One of them was Da’sean McFadden. In January 2024, McFadden acquired a BMW from his aunt, who he said was a domestic violence survivor and, as a precaution, heavily tinted her car windows.

Knowing the tint wasn’t street legal, McFadden said he lowered his windows “out of respect” while passing by Reich, who was on the other side of Joppa Road.

It was then, McFadden said, that Reich made a U-turn and began to follow him.

But McFadden, who had no criminal history, said Reich never appeared to hear him out during the traffic stop. McFadden said he explained to Reich that he was taking the vehicle into an auto shop across the street from where he was pulled over, but Reich had it towed anyway.

Reich told McFadden he made the stop because of the tinted windows, McFadden said, but the charges concerned the car’s registration, title and insurance. The vehicle had just been registered in Virginia, McFadden said.

Reich wrote McFadden three citations: improperly registering his title, failing to register and driving without insurance. The insurance charge was later dropped by prosecutors.

McFadden said Reich had the vehicle towed without letting him retrieve his belongings from it. The way the officer handled the encounter inspired McFadden to take his fight to Baltimore County court with a public defender.

When he got to the courthouse, McFadden said he noticed that the vast majority of the defendants there were Black.

“I could tell, if I was a person of a different color, it would have went a whole other way,” McFadden said.

The status quo

In January 2024, McCullough, just a few months into his role as Baltimore County’s police chief, responded to a recently published study the county had commissioned from two University of Maryland, Baltimore County professors on the racial disparities in county traffic stops.

Much like The Banner’s analysis, the study found that Black people were not only far more likely to be pulled over, but more likely to be searched as well.

At a meeting of the equitable policing advisory group, tasked with examining the issue, McCullough said he was determined to “combat” the disparities. But the chief added he was confident the department was already “on the right path” to doing just that.

“We are forging forward to provide an environment that is free of biased practices,” he said.

The chief did not offer specifics, though he briefly highlighted “several ongoing trainings” that included courses on fair and impartial policing and implicit bias.

In emailed statements, Lepola-Stewart, the Police Department spokesperson, cited training programs called Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics and Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement.

State Sen. Charles Sydnor, a Baltimore County Democrat who serves on the advisory group, said he was encouraged by the study at first, which concluded that the numbers were moving ever so slightly in the right direction.

In response to The Banner’s analysis, Sydnor said he was disappointed to learn that what he described as “the status quo” remained in place.

“It shows a need for us to re-examine how the system operates,” Sydnor said.

Sydnor, who said he has experienced racial profiling firsthand, introduced a bill in the General Assembly in January last year, hoping to curtail the disparities by making statewide changes.

The bill would have eliminated several minor offenses — such as broken taillights or driving in bus lanes — as primary reasons officers could cite to pull people over.

It died in committee.

In response to The Banner’s analysis, Natasha Dartigue, Maryland’s public defender and a key supporter of the traffic stop legislation, said that the county’s “refusal to admit that Black drivers are targeted by police is a denial of both data and reality.”

Ryan Coleman, former president of the Randallstown branch of the NAACP, also served on the traffic stop advisory group. He said there is widespread community support for more traffic enforcement, which has fallen off since the pandemic.

“We want the police to be able to do their jobs and be able to do it effectively,” he said. “Obviously, this kind of turns it on the head, when you see the numbers.”

Banner reporter Allan James Vestal and former editor Ryan Little contributed to this story.

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